970m Power Throttle?

This is something I noticed tonight when playing WoW. Granted I do have a 1060 blade on order but I would like to figure this out in case I see it in the future. Thermal throttling is one thing and an issue I have NEVER had with my blade. Temps stay well below that threshold.

I noticed my 970m dropping under 1000hz and decided to run gpu-z to figure out why.Since I was running reasonable temps I was confused. Turns out it's perf throttling due to power limit?? Is the 165w adapter not enough or am I missing something? I made sure all power settings were set to max through windows power settings and nvidia control panel. Still is happening though. Anyone know if this is a driver issue? Bios? Thanks in advance!

 

All mobile gpus even desktop (when oced) have power limit.
The power limit set by Razer is most likely due to thermal cooling capacity.
You can unlock the power limit by modifying the vbios though you need a proper laptop chassis/cooling to handle that.
1060 should perform better at the same power level and less power throttling compared to 1070, still not performance wise.
You can try dropping memory frequency (underclock) by -500mhz as that would leave room for gpu core max power sometimes. It might affect certain games performance negatively and positively, e.g some PostFX in games are memory heavy, rendering is heavy on gpu core etc...

 

Although I do not own a razer I have also had the same issue while my 970M is OC'd.

I have found unplugging my machine and plugging it back in to AC power seems to fix the power throttle. Unsure if this would work for your razer but worth a try I guess.

 

Thanks for the reply. I notice this power limit issue is only in certain games. This is without even overclocking the gpu. Mad Max and world of warcraft are the only two games I noticed the issue so far. More CPU intensive.

I am actually very interested in being able to unlock the power limit... especially because I don't seem to be thermal throttling and have a little bit of headroom to work with when it comes to thermals.

Is there a guide in unlocking the vbios in these laptops?? I have only ever done it with my Clevo laptop.

Also is it possible that a larger power adapter would make a difference? It seems when running the proper maximum clocks speeds the voltage sits a 1v in gpu-z and when the power limit kicks in it starts running under 1v. Sorry for the long post but I wanted to be as detailed as possible. Hopefully you can offer some further insight.




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I want to say that I tried that but I will attempt it again and see if it makes a difference. I can understand if it was thermal throttling, but it's running several degrees below where that would start for the GPU. As far as the CPU goes, it's running way below thermal throttle limit.

Maybe this won't even be an issue with the new 1060 model... but for the time being I would like to try and troubleshoot the issue.


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